Updates from the edge of the Web

Above you will see Kevin Dangoor showing of the fruits of his labor on VCS integration with Bespin. His screencast shows how you can fire up Bespin, tie into your VCS, and start coding. This is an exciting step for us.

You will notice that at one point Kevin doesn’t notice that he hasn’t saved his file before he tries to talk to the VCS. Since the video we have added an indicator that shows you if the file that you are editing hasn’t been saved yet. Long term, we are keen to have the collaboration feature where the files are constantly being saved back to the cloud, and the flow changes where “commit” is the new “save”. We will see.

Julian has added support for searching within a file and has partially implemented the search design:

Ben has also added hooks to the gutter which means that you will see that it is now dynamic. You can set a debugmode and add breakpoints, but we don’t have a backend for the debugger quite yet. Chris Jay has been playing with the gutter to show syntax errors over there and there is work on jslint output too.

The settings implementation has been changed too. We are finding that the user specific BespinSettings project is a great place to store all of your user specific data. We recently added your command history so that it is saved up there on command.history.txt. Easy to edit and tweak, and it goes with you wherever your editing goes! Anyway, the editor settings will now be found at settings.txt. One side benefit with this approach beyond those mentioned, is that we can delete the settings API from the Bespin server making it even easy to implement.

Finally, we have themes. There are some core themes that you get out of the box. Most people like the default one, but there are simple white, black, and a recent “Pastels”. You can recreate your own themes by placing a copy in BespinSettings/themes/themename.js allowing you to set theme themename away. We will be moving this format to simple CSS soon, so I wouldn’t spend too much time there. If you feel like getting creative in that way though, go ahead and create a Persona 🙂